Small-distance sensors are used, among other things, as pressure, proximity, roughness, mechanical stress and acceleration sensors, for example, in integrated microphony and for acquiring fingerprints.
For fingerprint acquisition in particular (to which reference is made herein purely by way of example of a preferred application of the present invention), known sensors include various types, such as optical, piezoelectric, variable-conductance, thermal, ultrasonic and capacitive, the most promising of which in terms of precision, size, production and cost are capacitive sensors.
Capacitive sensors are based on the principle that the capacitance between two armatures is inversely proportional to the distance between them, so that, using the contacting dermal tissue itself as the second armature of the sensor capacitor, and by determining the capacitance, it is possible to locate the ridges and grooves of the fingerprint. This is the principle used in U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,442 to Knapp, which relates to a sensor comprising an array of elementary cells, each comprising a sensitive electrode and an electronic switching device. The electrode is coated with dielectric material, such as passivation oxide or a polymer compound, onto which the epidermis is placed. When a cell is selected, a predetermined variation in potential is applied to the electrode to induce at the terminals an appropriate variation in charge. The extent of variation in charge depends on the capacitance associated with the electrode and is read by amplifying elements connected to the output of the device. To improve efficiency, the above patent suggests a surface grid connected to a reference potential to appropriately bias the skin tissue.
In the above known capacitive sensor, the capacitance between the armatures of a capacitor varies in inverse proportion to the distance between the armatures, which therefore poses the problem of normalizing the resulting data. In particular, if the capacitance being measured is very small, as in the application in question, serious difficulty is encountered in detecting the charge and discriminating between the various intermediate charge levels corresponding to different grey levels of the image to be generated in the presence of a low signal/noise ratio.